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Originally Posted by asjogren
Prices will rise because the Big 6 ate the competition. And Wall Street's quest for higher profits quarter-by-quarter will destroy the Big 6.
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It would be nice if it were that simple.
The problems affecting publishing aren't new, and ebooks haven't caused them. For decades, too many books have been chasing too few readers. Houses have been consolidating to achieve economies of scale and reduce costs. And publishers have been acquired by media conglomerates involved in film, TV, and music, who saw supposed synergies in having all forms of content under one roof. Those synergies were more apparent than real, and as the realization sunk in that publishing
couldn't generate the sorts of returns that other units made, the acquisitions began to unravel, as when Time Warner sold its Warner Books operation to Hachette.
That same consolidation has been occurring in book retailing. Smaller "mom and pop" bookstores are dying out. They can't match the buying power and the prices of the major chains, and buyers shop where they can get the books cheapest. I can think of a few independent bookstores near me, but they aim at niche markets like travel, photography, or children's books. The big chains are under pressure from discount retailers like Target, and "warehouse" stores like CoctCo and Sam's Club. and
everybody is under pressure from Amazon.
And "higher profits by quarter" isn't just Wall Street. Consider who the largest class of shareholders are:
pension funds. If you pay into a pension fund or an IRA, you are complicit in it, as you want your retirement finds to be preserved and grow, and the people running the funds invest where they see the best combination of safety and returns.
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Bypass will be the future. Authors Agents bypassing the Big Publishing Houses. Agents will contract for editing, art, and promotion services. And I bet some form of Venture Capital will become available.
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Uh-huh.
Something may well appear to fill the void if "Big Publishing" disappears. But the big issue is quality.
While you can argue that they do it badly,
selling books is what publishers
do. Publisher want to publish books they can
sell, so they have editors to work with authors to improve manuscripts. Every published author I know freely admits that good editors are a critical factor in their own success.
And possibly more important, publishers are filters. Even more important overall than what they
do publish is the vastly larger amount they reject. The stack of unsolicited manuscripts isn't called the "slush pile" for no reason.
The dream of eliminating the middleman and having a direct connection, author to reader, will be a nightmare if it becomes the norm. With the internet, ebooks, and Print On Demand,
everybody can get published. That's very nice. Who will
read it? The Internet is now the world's largest slush pile. There may be hidden gems, but frankly, I have neither the time, energy, nor desire to go plowing through it looking for them. They books may be cheap, but as with all else, you get what you pay for. There are several houses whose taste I've learned I can trust, and I'll buy books they publish, because I know they'll be worth reading. I want quality and someone else to winnow the wheat from the chaff, and I'll pay for it.
And "Agents will contract for editing, art, and promotion services"? Nope. That would mean agents morphing into publishers. It won't happen. It's not what they do, and they wouldn't know where to begin. It would be a great way to go belly up while they learned. You're probably thinking of Robert Wylie (see
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/22/books/22odyssey.html), who formed Odyssey Editions to publish electronic books. But the books he planned to issue were books by his clients which had already been bought, edited, and put through the print production process. He simply claimed the print publishers did not have the electronic rights, and he was free to bypass them and distribute ebook versions himself through Amazon.
After shots back and forth by both sides, a deal was struck with the publishers at rates Wylie wanted, which was the whole point of the exercise.
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Dennis